An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
EXISTENTIALISM IN THE NOVELS OF MULK RAJ ANAND
T. Pushpanathan
Assistant Professor,
Department of English, SCSVMV University, Kanchipuram, India
The revolutionary socialism and the comprehensive historical humanism are the important stages in
the growth of Anand as an artist. What is of paramount importance to Anand is the transformation of words
into prophecy. The pains and frustrations are not completely divorced from aspirations and exaltations in his
fiction. He transmutes in his art all feeling, all thought and all experience. He sees himself as the seer of a new
vision.
Anand claims that like Shelley he has to stir the suppressed yearnings for freedom and the forgotten
inner rhythms and the natural biological urges for fulfillment. He had to rule the hearts and minds of the
people and enable them to become more poised. When Anand immersed himself into the flowing vibrant, core
of humanity, it was not without his share of despair and delight. It was his strong faith in liberal humanism that
prevented him from a total commitment to a political doctrine. S.R. Bald is not fair to Anand if she thinks that
he attempted to lose his insecurity in the security of the Marxian ideology. Anand is for us much more than
“Auden of the Indian Literary World”. (Bald, 115)
Anand is both Asian and European contrary to his perception. He attacks the existing sociopolitical
order and highlights the contradictions and consistencies of the Indian as a victim but never loses his faith in
his capacity to straighten his back and look at the stars. Since human sufferings in the novels of Anand are
caused by variety of empirical factors, it is not without significance that he introduces new protagonists like
Bakha and Munoo were alien to literature. Anand’s envy of the rich is a hunger for social justice and the
inadequacies of his own life in India contributed something to these preoccupations. He writes with despair
mixed with candour:
“But I do not apologize for this because it is not easy in the face of such wretchedness and misery as I
had seen in India to believe that material happiness and wellbeing had no connection with real
happiness and the desire for beauty” (Apology for Heroism, 76)
Anand rediscovers in his novels the vanities, the vapidities, the conceits and perplexities with which
he had grown up. He writes: “I felt guilty, for needless suffering was no matter for complacent pride or
gratitude” (Apology for Heroism, 7)
[566]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
Saroj Cowasjee enlarges the scope for existential consciousness in Anand’s fiction in his significant
remark given below: “Princes or paupers, all his heroes are victims; some of society’s making others of their
own” (41). He brings Bakha, the Prince, Noor and Maqbool under the same category. While comparing Anand
with Orwell, Graham Parry blurs the positive pattern and deforms it into a lopsided picture. We do not feel that
in his early novels, frustrations give touch of tragic futility to the lives of the protagonists.
Anand is a realistic novelist with a difference. The outward and material manifestation of life is not the
whole truth for him. He does not ignore completely the life of the spirit. His man is not dominated by the
environment and chained to a material and physical universe. His realism embraces all aspects of life.
Each novel of Anand offers the conclusion that the regeneration of human society is governed by
moral and spiritual laws. He does not seek to convert his people to an exclusive creed. Authentic experience is
more important than a pre-conceived dogma even in the early novels of Anand. V.A. Shahane defines the new
order as a conjunction between self and history. Anand does castigate the pervasive moral lassitude in India
but India is not a nightmare to him. While discovering the pattern of despair and delight even in the first
trilogy we can realize that the hard and fast categories are inoperable and Anand questions the absolute utility
of each position. If Anand underplays the significant elements in the Indian tradition and over-emphasizes its
limitations, that is part of the larger integrative vision. Anand’s vision is not distorted and marred by over
writing and sentimentality.
If the modern Indian writer is a literary Janus, it is not his limitation. If he is an heir to a rich cultural
past and also part of the modern Indian ethos, it gives his perception a deeper and richer resonance. Anand’s
fiction may be called a literature of protest because he writes about an Indian’s degeneration and despair. It is
equally true that he is never blind to the lingering sparks of life. He also emphasizes the craving for life in the
midst of misery and torpor.
Anand describes his characters as part of his autobiography, of the torments, ecstasies and deliriums of
the last two generations. His emphasis on torment and ecstasy is evenly distributed. S.R. Bald rightly observes
that the character of the message remains remarkably consistent. According to her the principal figure brings
to focus the injustice of society. She also points out that the appearance of the revolutionary hero shows that
the realization of a good life is possible.
It is of immense prophetic implication that Anand begins with the despair of the caste system and
explores its ramifications in a larger context. The slim novel Untouchable shows the quintessential Anand. The
caste-system which has degenerated with the passage of time into hydra-headed evil signifies a set of crippling
[567]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
injunctions. The novel gives an empirical affirmation of what the caste system connotes. The colony in which
Bakha lives it’s dark and damp. On the positive side, Bakha is in stature dignified, the nature’s well-built child.
Anand presents in the life of Bakha an inauspicious day punctuated by happy and sad experiences. Bakha is
confronted with a reality that is stripped off all romantic illusions. When he is slapped he faces the crisis of
identity.
What the novel seeks is love and not hate. Anand wrote this novel to stir up tender feelings in the
readers. Bakha is presented as a victim trapped in a recalcitrant society. His various responses to the sad and
happy incidence make the perspective of hope and despair complex. Saroj Cowasjee hints at the larger
implications of this perspective in his following remark:
“Untouchable opens quietly on an autumn morning and by the time the evening approaches, the author
has been able to build round his hero a spiritual crisis of such breadth that it seems to embrace the
whole of India” (53)
The fact that Bakha is a child of darkness can not obscure that fact that he also derives his strength from the
sun. The novel is about both the Sun and the slum. Dr. K.N. Sinha defines the central conflict in the novel as
Bakha’s oscillation between rage and despair. The morning sun starts the rhythm of his life and the afternoon
marks its “waning”. The hero’s adventure is symbolically mapped out in terms of the sun’s progress in the sky.
E.M. Forster in his preface to the novel sums up the pattern of despair and hope that the novel gradually builds
up.
What is more important than the manifest social plea, is the personality of Bakha characterized and
coloured by his positive qualities like trustingness, ingenuousness and his unquenchable wonder at life.
A brief analysis of the novel is not out of place to show how despair and delight are integrated to
compose a comprehensive perspective on life. For this, Anand piles up ominous and auspicious details. Bakha
lives in a cave-like dinky, dank, one-roomed mud-house. His features are handsome but sometimes knotted
and ugly. His bones are stiff and his flesh numb with the cold. On the positive side, his capacity for active
work flows like constant water from a natural spring. Each muscle of his body shines forth like glass. The
burning flame gives him a sense of power. There are sores in his soul and his sense of segregation is corrosive.
Anand describes the awful touch-scene with terrifying honesty. He writes despairingly:
But the crowd which passed round him, staring, pulling grimacing jeering and leering was without a
shadow of pity for his remorse (Untouchable, 49).
[568]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
Anand describes in the subsequent lines the violent stirrings in the soul of Bakha:
The strength, the power of his giant body glistened with the desire for revenge in his eyes, while
horror, rage, indignation swept over his frame (Untouchable, 50)
E.M. Forster in his preface to the novel recognizes the wider gamut of emotions assimilated into the novel.
The following remark shows his admiration for Anand’s mixed temperament:
He (Anand) has just the right mixture of insight and detachment and the fact that he has come to
fiction through philosophy has given him depth. (Preface to Untouchable, vii)
It is not without significance that what is physical and biological is emphasized in the opening pages of the
novel. Bakha was very fond of the sugary tea he drank every morning. Anand writes:
It was so delightful, the taste of that hot sugary liquid that Bakha’s mouth always watered for it on the
night before the morning on which he had to drink it. (Untouchable, 13)
His feelings for his dead mother are equally sensuous. Anand writes:
He often thought of his mother, the small, dark figure swathed simply in a tunic, a pair of baggy
trouser and an apron (Untouchable, 14).
What delighted him more than the sugary tea or the sweeter memory of his mother was his work. Anand
compliments him on that ground in the following lines:
“To him (Bakha) work was a sort of intoxication which gave him a glowing health and plenty of easy
sleep”. (Untouchable, 18)
Anand romanticizes Bakha’s attitude to work and glorifies the triumph it brought to Bakha. Anand writes:
The toil of the body bad built up for him a very fine physique. It seemed to suit him, to give him
homogeneity, a wonderful wholeness to his body… And it seemed to give him nobility, strangely in
contrast with his filthy profession (Untouchable, 20).
Bakha’s action which has a romantic character in the beginning, acquires a symbolic glow in the subsequent
pages. The pattern of existential consciousness is lifted to a higher dimension. The following lines give an
indication of awareness in Bakha. His anxiety enables him to think of choices:
[569]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
The burning flame seemed to ally itself with him. It seemed to give him a sense of power, the power to
destroy. It seemed to infuse into him a masterful instinct somewhat akin to sacrifice (Untouchable, 21)
Anand writes about the body of Sohini and her subdued response to the complementing gaze of Lakshman.
The way Anand describes her beauty is almost Lawrentian. Let’s look into the following lines:
She had a sylph-like form, no thin but full-bodied, within the limits of her graceful frame, well
rounded on the hips (Untouchable, 22).
Anand records the feelings of her modest lover with equal sympathy and sensitivity:
He too had noticed her before and felt a stirring in his blood, the warm impulse of love, the strangely
affecting desire of the soul to reach out something beyond…. (Untouchable, 30)
It is not without symbolic significance that Bakha can relate himself to the power and the splendour of the Sun.
Anand writes:
He caught the full force of its glare, and was dazed. He stood lost for a moment, confused in the
shimmering rays, feeling as though there were nothing but the sun, the sun, the sun, everywhere, in
him, on him, before him and behind him (Untouchable, 33-34).
This is for Bakha the world of that rare translucent luster. When Bakha is slapped, he is full of despair. But it
is not a moment of defeat. Anand writes about his strength and rage in his soul. Let’s look closely into the
following lines:
The strength and the power of his giant body glistened with the desire for revenge in his eyes, while
horror, rage, indignation swept over his frame. (Untouchable, 50)
Religion had for Anand both delight and despair. Bakha has a feeling of awe when he sights the temple which
is a colossal, huge, turreted structure. Anand describes his fear when he is near the temple. He describes
Bakha’s despair at the sight of the temple:
But now he was afraid. The temple seemed to advance towards him like a monster, and to envelop
him. (Untouchable, 59)
Bakha, though not twice-born, is not without a mysterious feeling when he has a close look at the dark
sanctum. Anand writes:
[570]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
In the innermost recesses of the tall, dark sanctum, beyond the brass gates, past what seemed a maze of
corridors, Bakha’s eyes probed the depths of a raised platform. (Untouchable, 59)
He is equally moved when he hears the loud flourish of the first conch note, soft, clear and potent. He was
profoundly moved. He was affected by the rhythm of the song and his head hung in the worship of the
unknown God. It is not without irony that in such a moment of his spiritual awareness, Bakha hears the shriek
of his sister, who is on the verge of being disgraced by the priest of the temple. Anand describes his despair
and anger:
He felt he could kill them all. He looked ruthless, deadly pale and livid with anger and rage.
(Untouchable, 62)
Bakha also knows the heritage of thousands of years and the tropical emotions that well up in him under an
open sky lessen his respect for life. He knows that the priest is safe behind the walls of the temple. Anand
writes:
He could not invade the magic circle which protects a priest from attack by anybody, especially by a
law caste man. So in the highest moment of his strength, the slave in him asserted itself. (Untouchable,
65)
In such a darkening atmosphere the sister of Ramcharan creates for Bakha a new world full of wonder and
enchantments. Anand graphically describes Bakha’s feelings for that girl who gracefully grows into a young
woman. He writes:
There was something wistful about her, a soft light in her eyes for which she had become endeared to
him. She had grown up to be a tall girl with a face as brown as ripe wheat and hair as black as the rain
clouds. (Untouchable, 87)
Neither Gandhi nor Christianity brings for Bakha the consolation and comfort he needs. It is only the poet who
can give him a new vision to liberate him from his sickening surroundings. The novel does not end on a note
of despair paralyzing the hero into inaction. The fires of the sunset blaze on the distant horizon. Bakha looks at
the magnificent orb of terrible brightness blowing on the margin of the sky. The pattern of despair and delight
is given a cosmic sweep in the concluding lines of the novel. Anand writes:
[571]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformation of space
and time and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul. (Untouchable,
157)
Bakha has to find out the poet to know more about the path to his salvation before he proceeds homewards.
Coolie comprehends deeper levels of despair and degradation with a subdued undercurrent of delight.
Munoo, the young protagonist, moves from the village to the town, from the town to the city and then to the
mountains broadening the canvas of the novel. He is eventually swept to his doom. He is a frail boy in a
hostile world. He is more a victim than a rebel. Primitivism, capitalism, industrialism, communalism and
colonialism are the various elements skillfully orchestrated into the novel. Anand expresses his rage at various
kinds of exploitation ranging from capitalism to communalism. Life for the simple boy is a test of his vitality
and impetuosity and his fundamental right to happiness is denied to him in a hostile climate. The cotton mills
in Bombay where the boy has to work exposes him to the full force of the callous capitalistic order. He drifts
into a more complicated and devious world. Let us look into the following critical observations:
The novel is a continent whose bleakness, vastness and poverty are unshaded by a touch of the
glamour. (Cowasjee, 63)
The novel depicts Munoo’s experiences in Bombay and Daulatpur emphasizing his savage struggle for
survival. Munoo has to endure the foul smell and stink, damp and sticky sweat, dust and heat and dung. In
such a climate life is a threat and death is a release. The rich merchants are contrasted with the dark coolies in
their patched up rags who live in the congested hovels. What Bombay presents is a dreadful pattern of garish
opulence and rampant filth. The novel shows death through alienation. Despair is a pervasive feeling
throughout the novel. What is to be explored is the element of delight which is not absent in the novel. The
novel is not unshaded by a touch of glamour. The glamour comes from the primitive emotions of the
protagonist and the majestic sights of Nature.
It is an irony that Munoo is not willing to tear himself away from the sandy margins where he ran to
the tune of lavish beauty. It is also ironical that he traces the outlines of Sheela’s figure with a delicate light on
her regular mobile features. His impetuously, the utter humanness of his impulses the sheer wantonness of his
unconscious life-force reveal his natural vitality. We admire Munoo for his human and hedonistic impulses.
His search for delight is menaced by the brutalizing urbanization symbolized by Bombay. He descends into the
strange, dark, airless outhouse and hears the deafening roar of the machine. There are demons outside him.
Friendship and brotherhood do exist in the sickening climate of Bombay. What Bombay gives to the boy is
[572]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
only the congested streets and the moonless sky. It is not without significance that his love for the high
altitudes does not abate even in Bombay. The sudden surge of love and friendship makes the death of Munoo a
memorable and moving moment. Anand writes:
Munoo clutches at Mohan’s hand, felt the warm blood in his veins like a tide reaching out to distance
to which it had never gone before. (Coolie……)
Coolie has an edge over Untouchable because it is according to Iyengar, ‘the most extensive in time and space,
evoking, variegated action and multiplicity in character’. (336) The scenes in quick succession make the effect
panoramic. We like the novel for its partial progression, the sheer amplitude. The white, the black, the grey
compose the atmosphere of the novel. If the colours in the novel are too thick, it is not without a motive. To
dismiss the protagonist as a static and passive victim is to ignore his positive emotions and impulses. The final
part of the novel may be hurried and sketchy, but it is not to be seen as an anticlimax.
Coolie may lack the economical and classical tightness of Untouchable as emphasized by Marelene
Fisher but it does show movement, colour and restlessness. The fact that Munoo is sustained by his memories
of his childhood spent in the hills, his final return to his origin is not without positive significance. His death is
not without deeper metaphysical significance. The transcendental close of the novel gives a new dimension to
the context of despair and delight.
Coolie resembles Hard Times because it offers searing and stark details. When Munoo is torn from his
moorings, his feeling of nostalgia for his lost world is not without delight.
And through the tears, he could see the high rocks, the great granite hills, gray in the blaze of the sun
and the silver line of the bees. (Coolie, 24)
The desire for release form the constricting climate of Bombay is recorded in the given lines:
He felt he must get up and rush away somewhere beyond the confines of the street, somewhere where
there was a whiff of air to breathe. (Coolie, 192)
Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) is one of the most crucially important novels of Anand’s first trilogy. It reflects
the miseries of common working class. The novel delineates the innocence of the labour class. The innocence
of the naïve working class matures into experience, which the protagonist of this novel stands for. The theme
of exploitation in this novel is part of the larger colonial experience. These are oblique references to the
colonial climate in the first two novels, but in this novel colonialism are analyzed with greater concentration.
[573]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
The entire tragedy is unfolded against the dark backdrop of the tea plantation which symbolizes the might and
inhumanity of the British Empire. The racial problem looms larger in this novel. The Indian social life is given
a new dimension. The British officials and their Indian subordinates are ranged against the defenseless coolies
working in the stifling surroundings. The capitalist forces are symbolized in this novel by the British. The
English men who believe in the ideology of Whiteman’s burden are pathologically suspicious of all Indians.
Every coolie is a potential agitator for the British officials. The natural result of this distrust is the despair of
the Indians working there.
Gangu is the protagonist of the novel. He is unlike Bakha and Munoo, an old man, a beaten man.
Everything about him is blotted out. He faces the storm which ruins his harvest with a feeling of resignation.
Anand describes his feelings tellingly:
Gangu watched the violent play of God, the storm with an almost imperturbable calm, as if in the
moment of his uttermost anguish, in the very moment of his despair, at the loss of his harvest, he had
been purged of his fear of the inevitable. (Two Leaves and a Bud, 250)
The fear of the inevitable makes this novel more deterministic than Untouchable and Coolie but this picture of
the pre-independent peasant character can not blind us to his more positive sturdy qualities of hands and heart.
Gangu, according to a critic “presents all the bafflingly contrasting strains which marked the pre-independence
peasant character” (Naik, 52)
The strain of irony is unbearable at the close of the novel when Reggie Hunt who kills Gangu and
attempts to defile his daughter is discharged. Marlene Fisher gives credence to this kind of perception in her
following critical observation: “Cruelty and oppression do win out in Two Leaves and a Bud leaving Anand
sick with despair and rage”. (Fisher, 52)
K.N. Sinha is fairer and more perceptive when he does not give a disproportionate importance to
cruelty, lust and evil in the novel. According to Dr. Sinha, the novel derives its power from the counter
pointing of good and evil. Marlene Fisher loses sight of what is good and uplifting in novel. Gangu is much
more than a mere scapegoat sacrificed at the altar of the narrow racial prejudices. We can notice in the doctor
the qualities which sharply contrast with the lust and cruelty embodied by Reggie Hunt. If the novel is viewed
as a moral allegory, it means that the novel is not without dream and delight. Fiction is much more than
straight facts. To dismiss the doctor as a mechanical contrivance is as unjust as the theory that Anand is
hindered by his hatred for the British civilization. Anand may be full of rage, but he is not blind with rage. The
Englishmen are not always painted in the blackest hues.
[574]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
The novel is not without such scenes and situations which give us a positive feeling of joy. Gangu is
not without zeal and jest for life. The following lines of the novel enable us to view his character in a correct
perspective:
He (Gangu) gripped the handle of his spade with an unwavering faith and dug his foot into the sod
made by a furrow and sensed the warm freshness of the earth that would yield fruit. (Two Leaves and
a Bud, 146)
Reggie Hunt may symbolize untamed animality and unmitigated evil, but he is alarmed at the rising force and
expectation of labourers working in the sickening surroundings.
The wild swing of their axes, the sharp sweep of their scythes and the clean cut of their knives, filled
Reggie with a belligerent passion for destruction. (Two Leaves and a Bud, 46)
The sudden appearance of a python which will attack Gangu’s daughter, Leila is not without optimistic
implications. Anand gives copious details to make the situation highly symbolic. The sharp scythe in Leila’s
hand, the rustle of the breeze, the sweep of the grasses, the damp turbid smell of the sunless groves create an
appropriate backdrop for the appearance of the python and its terrible embrace of Leila. After a good deal of
writhing and wriggling the sharp blade of Leila’s instrument bruises the python. The blood on the scythe
weaves together a number of emotions in the heart of the readers. The revolutionary message which is not
without delight is transparent.
Leila as the devoted daughter does have her tender feeling for her father deformed by time. Anand
emphasizes another aspect of Leila’s character in the following lines: “She raised her head and scanned his
visage to see if she could glean the secret of that conflict which agitated him” (Two Leaves and a Bud, 82).
She combines in her character turbulence and tenderness. Even Gangu is not too brutalized to respond
to tragic situations in a deeply human manner. When his wife is dead, the past flows back into his mind with
all its ache and delight. Anand writes poignantly: “Gangu had had her body, but the tingling warmth of her
passionate embrace seemed so distant now” (Two Leaves and a Bud, 107).
The act of cutting and hacking in the dense jungle of Assam is both ominous and auspicious. They
suggest rumblings in the human world and those rumbling are interwoven into the rumblings in nature. Anand
writes in a way that gives the human action cosmic proportions:
[575]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
A rumble and a distant peal, then a piercing stroke followed by a cracking noise as if the heaven and
earth had split into two and he thought that the world was going to be annihilated (Two Leaves and a
Bud, 60).
It is now clear that the novel assembles the humanistic, Hellenistic and even the nihilistic impulses of the
author and the protagonist of the novel. It is not without irony that Gangu had a premonition of the coming
calamity. He forgets all his dread and despair when he finds vaster spaces to liberate him from his cramping
situation. Anand writes: “He felt he would like to jump out to the edge of these Elysian Fields and settle down
there for ever” (Two Leaves and a Bud, 10).
Gangu the illiterate peasant symbolizes the transformation going on in the minds of common people.
The realization of his miserable condition makes him aware and he can hear the echoes in his soul. He
becomes the brooding philosopher, who influences his daughter, Leila. He questions the existence of God and
sadistically shrieks – “There was no God. There were only men and life and death fulfilling their purpose
through cross-purposes, as in a play, Leila.” (Two Leaves and a Bud …)
Two Leaves and a Bud is much more than a colonial document or the author’s autobiographical
account. The protagonist of the novel does project his creator’s resilience and recalcitrance. The very opening
of the line of the novel “life is like a journey into the unknown” makes the novel more existential than
colonial. The philosopher in Anand does colour his perception in this novel but it is a deplorable distortion if
we say that Anand gloats on nullity and futility in the novel. If the hero shrinks into insignificance, it is a
metaphysical feeling and not his utter helplessness or hopelessness.
The deep blue of the sky spread a garish hue across the valley and seemed to have subdued every
element by its vast expansive force into an utter stillness. (Two Leaves and a Bud, 117)
The metaphysical anguish of the hero can not blind us to his reverence for life manifested in his fondness for
woman. Anand records his feelings for a woman:
There is something of water about a woman. Flowing, always flowing one way or another, restless like
the waves, sometimes overwhelmingly moody, fickle and capricious as a river in a storm, sometimes
bright and smiling, sometimes soft and sad but always tender and kind. (Two Leaves and a Bud, 146)
It is crucial passage highlighting Anand’s synthetic and comprehensive response to the human world and his
desire to grasp the agonies and ecstasies if offers. An examination of the evidences in the first three novels of
[576]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
Anand sufficiently shows that his chief objective as a novelist is the creative interpretation of Indian scenes
and situations. Indian culture has its own image and Anand projects its positive value. He shows the modes of
our life and our urges, longings and thought processes. Indian psyche is an important part of the cultural
pattern authentically delineated in the first three novels of Anand.
We do not exaggerate if we notice throughout India the same set of primordial images and archetypal
patterns of the Indian consciousness. Anand’s fiction does show the complex crystalline structure that
characterizes Indian civilization. The English he uses does not inhibit his response or distort truth.
Within the ordered complexity and harmonized multiplicity of Indian culture can be seen a universe
which can absorb different faiths and doctrines and still retain its destiny. This archetypal pattern continues to
operate in the fiction of Anand. We do recognize the superiority in the subconscious mind of the heroes like
Bakha, Munoo and Gangu. The pull exerted by the native ethos in their character is rendered in deeply human
terms. The desire for adjustment can be seen in the souls of these sensitive heroes. It is not surprising if
Krishnan as the protagonist of Anand’s autobiographical novels does not carry the old message of the colonist.
He is the free convert, the international citizen who carries a new message of progress and good cheer. The
western experience even in Two Leaves does not go waste. It is used to test the greatness of our native culture
by heightening its undesirable aspects. The accident can only intensify or modify the positive elements of our
resilient native culture.
The pattern of despair and delight is perhaps a commonplace theme and too broad a category. While
focusing on this topic one has to keep in mind a diversity of culturally – oriented viewpoints. India’s recurrent
droughts, its barren landscape and its over-populated cities give Kamala Markandaya despair in her novel, A
Handful of Rice. It is communal tension that is for Khushwant Singh the material for despair in his famous
novel, Train to Pakistan. Writers like Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan find a place for human suffering within a
larger philosophical context. Suffering is not a negative experience for their heroes. It is our feeling that
suffering is not allied to meaninglessness and despair even in Anand’s fiction. Even the apotheosis of the nonheroic is a deliberate reflection of the heroic in his fiction. The humble victim is crushed by the relentless
immobility of rigid class structures and imperial feudalism in the first three novels of Anand. This does not
mean that there is no heroism in these novels. It is true that Anand’s hero is not the military hero, the great
man in the Carlylean view of history. The realism of little men and women is envisioned by Steinbeck in The
Grapes of Wrath. The existential doom is something peculiar in this age of anxiety but Anand’s hero even in
his early novels is a mystic archetype, totally out of touch with the modern age’s skepticism and banality.
[577]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
Anand’s leading men are not oxen and women are not good sports. Everything in his fiction is not brash and
over-coloured.
The secular view of Man was not available to writers in India before Gandhian thought projected it.
The only outlook available to them was religious that focused wholly on man’s relation to God. The novel
must deal with man as a free social being. It is Gandhi who emphasized the infinite importance and
immeasurable potency of the individual in society. Gandhi also highlighted his moral autonomy and saw him
as an evolving entity. Gandhi tied together the personal and the national, the ethical and the political, the
emotional and spiritual into a coherent world view. It was Gandhi who taught an individual to connect his
personal anxiety with national hope. The teachings of Gandhi combined social concern with traditional ethics.
Gandhi created a new image of India. C.D. Narasimhaiah does not exaggerate when he comments that
Gandhi transfigured the image of India. National idealism does not mean adulation of the past. Gandhi also
emphasized that the poor and starving India has an untapped potential of unlimited possibilities. He broke the
shackles all around. Indians could speak and rant under his influence. Mulk Raj Anand also acknowledges that
Gandhi let loose a stream of consciousness which released our people into a new kind of solidarity. He does
refer to the radical transformation of the whole socio-political meaning. Anand found in Gandhi a new
ferment, a new kind of ethos that gave content to Indian personality. Gandhi touched the innermost chords of
the dormant Indian consciousness. It is not surprising if Anand revolted against academic philosophy in favour
of lived and felt experience sensitively recorded in his first three novels.
Anand does not deal with the theme of alienation even in his early novels but it is not his reductivist
approach. Arun Joshi, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie represent a kind of reality that is alien to Mulk Raj
Anand. In all the novels of Arun Joshi, the narrator finds himself in the shattered mirror. He looks deformed
and distorted with funny face and funny voice. Everything is a part of the maze of labyrinthine darkness. All
his characters are consumed by this darkness. Anand, on the contrary, does find a way out of this maze and
tyranny of history. He is equally different from Salman Rushdie whose sensibility views experience not as a
rationally classifiable entity but as a fluid seamless process. What he gives is illusion and hallucination. Anand
does not write a literature of frustrated desires and he does not subvert the notion of objective reality. His
interrogation is constant but not unremitting. The ghostly essence does not cloud the life of his protagonist. He
does not see life and its meaning in fragments. The connection between him and India does not remain
obscured. The hero of Rushdie’s Midnights Children is a victim to a social and political world which gobbles
up sensitive individualism.
[578]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
The colonial consciousness that appears faintly in Two Leaves and a Bud finds a powerful expression
in the writings of V.S. Naipaul. The exploitation and cultural disorientation inflict lacerating wounds in his
novels. His novels explore the failure and isolation of his unanchored community and they are without
purgatorial awareness and resonance of human emotion. Naipaul’s individuals are prisoners trapped in their
own inertia and their private neurosis place them out of communication with the reality.
It is true that fictional art is skeptical and the novelist is a subversive agent. He calls the old order into
question and creates disturbance and unrest. Anand’s rebellion has the potentiality to produce out of that
disturbance and unrest the context in which the redemptive action is possible. Naipaul’s fiction is heavily
weighted against human interest. R.S. Pathak rightly describes his consciousness as ‘fractured’. The Circle of
Reason written by Amitav Ghosh is able to avoid the obsession with fragmentation and helplessness. He is in a
significant way the true descendent of Mulk Raj Anand. India today is heading towards one of the gloriest
chapters of its restless existence. Many of us feel that the discontinuities within our heritage are negations. On
the other hand, the dominant tradition is being regarded as the only legitimate source of our complex culture.
The Circle like The Bubble suggests that any relationship must rest on a dynamic and sensitive grappling with
similarities and differences. The vision of life as a process transforms the restless world in the novels of both
Ghosh and Anand. This vision of life is a dynamic urge to find a relationship with the rich diversity of our
world even in Coolie and Two Leaves and a Bud. The problem of human survival is dependent on finding the
connection between a full conception of relationship and of social change. Anand tries to prevent the
discrimination from becoming antagonistic in Across the Black Waters and The Bubble more forcefully. We do
feel that Anand’s social perception includes rather than excludes even in his early novels.
D.W. Harding rightly remarks that the social life and the literature of a period can be seen as a
continuous process of reciprocal sanctioning and challenging. The network of mutual support and mutual
control makes up society. The social insulation and deviant behaviour are the common facts in the fiction of
Anand. The compact normality breaks up in his fiction and alien inclinations are not excluded from it. His hero
even in the early novels is not a self-controlled reasonable adult. In this way his fiction includes several areas
of human experience and interests, particularly of the poorer social classes in the rural areas. Anand allows his
hero to question and test the scales of value and moral codes. His perspective of despair and delight shows his
willingness to explore. In his fiction, the lower classes are not regarded negatively as mere objects of
compassion. They embody a segment of valuable human experience and Anand does not allow it to be lost in
the urban civilization of the prosperous.
[579]
An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal
(Peer Reviewed & Opened Access Indexed)
Web: www.jmsjournals.in Email: [email protected]
Vol. 2, Issue-I
July 2016
A society is modern when its members are intellectually mature. Arnold’s ideal of order and
rationality reduces itself to excessive limitations. Anand feels that the order our civilization has achieved is at
the cost of extravagant personal repression, coercion and acquiescence. Anand is to some extent like Nietzsche
who exalts Dionysus. In the Dionysiac rapture, the individual forgets himself. He also defends the taming hand
of Apollo. Anand does discover the primal energy but it is not non-ethical. The fullness of spiritual perfection
is not possible without escaping from the societal bond. Anand assembles all these experiences even in his first
trilogy and this makes his perspective of despair and delight not only deeply human but also richly complex.
It is thus evident that the energy of the protagonist in each novel of the first trilogy is arrested in the
oppressive institutional framework. This arrest of energy in a web of prescriptions and prohibitions breeds in
the hero a deep sense of despair. This can not blind us to the sparks that occasionally flash in their soul. The
social and political forces though formidable can not black out the sun and stars for them. These heroes are
aided in their search for coherence by the forces which are too big for the perpetuators of the cruel institutions
to grasp. Delight which is like a faint glimmer will appear with greater force in the second trilogy. This swing
towards delight will chiefly depend on the greater sense of the new hero’s involvement and determination. The
energy which is arrested in the first trilogy will struggle relentlessly for its release in the second trilogy. The
pattern we’re exploring is therefore, not stagnant. The pattern is a part of the social and spiritual evolution in
the consciousness of the author.
References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Anand, Mulk Raj. Apology for Heroism. London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946.
Bald, S.R. Novelists and Political Consciousness. Delhi: Epigraph-Chanakya Publications. 1982.
Cowasjee, Saroj. Author to critc: Letters of Mulk Raj Anand. Calcutta : Writers workshop. 1968.
E.M. Forster, Preface to Untouchable: Arnold Associates, New Delhi, 1998.
Fisher, Marlene. The Wisdom of the Heart: A Study of the Works of Mulk Raj Anand. New Delhi: Sterling
Publishers, 1985.
6. Iyengar, K.R.S. Foreword to G.S. Balaramgupta’s Book, Mulk Raj Anand: A Study of his Fiction in Human
Perspective, Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot. 1974.
7. M.K.Naik, Mulk Raj Anand; Arnold Heinemann, New Delhi, 1973.
8. Mulk Raj Anand, Coolie; Penguin Books,New Delhi, 1998.
9. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable;Arnold Associates, New Delhi, 1998.
10. Shahane, Vasanth A. “Introduction P IX”. Explorations in modern Indo English Fiction; (ed). R.K. Dhawan,
New Delhi: Bahr publications, 1982.
11. Sinha, K.N. Mulk Raj Anand, New York: Twayne Pub. Inc., 1972.
[580]